Industrial Uses of Biomass Energy: The Example of Brazil

Industrial Uses of Biomass Energy demonstrates that energy-rich vegetation, biomass, is a key renewable energy resource for the future. Most energy scenarios recognise bioenergy as an important component in the future world’s energy outlook, both in developed and developing countries. Brazil, uniquely, has a recent history of large-scale biomass industrial uses that makes it a specially important test-bed both for the development of biomass technology and its utilisation, and for understanding how this is shaped by political and socio-economic forces. Perhaps their most famous development was PROALCOOL, the national programme for producing fuel for the nation’s automobiles from alcohol derived from sugar, as a substitute for petrol. But other sectors of the Brazilian economy traditionally, and presently, use biomass as a major energy source. The book analyses the cause for this and the alternatives. Finally, it is argued that Brazil’s experience with the development for industrial biomass use provides wider lessons and insights in the context of the international movement for sustainable economic development. This book is an interdisciplinary, multi-author work, based upon a recently completed international study by Brazilian and British experts at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Energy Planning-NIPE, State University Campinas and King’s College, University of London.